Even when a writer has determined the likely target audience for their book, they sometimes have problems figuring out where that target audience hangs out. Let me share a promotion tip with you that may help you figure this out.
Alexa is a search engine that can help writers locate those websites most frequently visited by their target audience. For example, let’s suppose you have written a book with a subject matter that will be mostly of interest to women 50 years or older. Then you hear about this very popular site called Wattpad that connects readers with writers all over the world. Should you spend your time promoting your book on Wattpad? If you copy the URL for Wattpad and paste it into the search box at the top of the Alexa page and click “search,” Alexa will give you an analysis of this site.
On the page you will find these options: Traffic Stats, Search Analytics, Audience, Contact Info, Reviews, Related Links, and Clickstream. Click on the tab that says “Audience.” Alexa will display a page that will break down the audience that visits Wattpad using several parameters.
Alexa is a search engine that can help writers locate those websites most frequently visited by their target audience. For example, let’s suppose you have written a book with a subject matter that will be mostly of interest to women 50 years or older. Then you hear about this very popular site called Wattpad that connects readers with writers all over the world. Should you spend your time promoting your book on Wattpad? If you copy the URL for Wattpad and paste it into the search box at the top of the Alexa page and click “search,” Alexa will give you an analysis of this site.
On the page you will find these options: Traffic Stats, Search Analytics, Audience, Contact Info, Reviews, Related Links, and Clickstream. Click on the tab that says “Audience.” Alexa will display a page that will break down the audience that visits Wattpad using several parameters.
You can see that Wattpad is mostly frequented by women. However, among the visitors the 18-24 years old range is overrepresented with respect to the general population. So Wattpad may not be the ideal place to promote this book. But let’s repeat the above process for another site called LibraryThing.
Here we see that among the group of people that visit this website, women in the 45 to 65 year old group is overrepresented compared to the general population. Therefore this may be a more logical site to promote the book.
Alexa also gives you additional information such as the popularity of the website (global traffic rank), the rank in the U.S. and the site’s reputation (the number of sites linking to the website). If you are willing to install the free Alexa tool bar in your computer you can get access to even more information like the ethnicity and income of the population visiting a site.
Please note that the above is a rather simplistic analysis and there are several other things to take into account before you decide to devote your valuable time to promoting your book on a website, but Alexa may be a good starting point that will help you optimize your efforts. Go to the Alexa site and play around with it a little analyzing several websites that you are using or plan to use for promotion of your book, and leave a comment here and let us know of your results or any questions you may have.
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Alexa also gives you additional information such as the popularity of the website (global traffic rank), the rank in the U.S. and the site’s reputation (the number of sites linking to the website). If you are willing to install the free Alexa tool bar in your computer you can get access to even more information like the ethnicity and income of the population visiting a site.
Please note that the above is a rather simplistic analysis and there are several other things to take into account before you decide to devote your valuable time to promoting your book on a website, but Alexa may be a good starting point that will help you optimize your efforts. Go to the Alexa site and play around with it a little analyzing several websites that you are using or plan to use for promotion of your book, and leave a comment here and let us know of your results or any questions you may have.
***
If you like this blog you can have links to each week's posts delivered to your e-mail address. Please click here.
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